Using PHP/MYSQL on Mac OSX

Hi! I've been reading a few posts about creating a database-driven photo gallery, I already use Coppermine on my host but it was installed and setup for me by an automated script so don't really know what's involved. But I digress...

It would be great if I could tinker with Coppermine-based pages without having to upload them every time, and read that Mac OS X has PHP and MYSQL already installed, it's just a matter of activating them - does anyone know the relevant commands for Terminal? What then? How do I make my Coppermine pages work?

Basically all I want is to have a very simple gallery page with one large image on the left/centre and a scrollable vertical row of thumbnail images down the right hand side, a few different categories of images, maybe a nice banner across the top, and a little text about each image. No comments, no user accounts (except perhaps my own, but I'd be just as happy to upload photos to some dir and have them included in the database automatically). I know Coppermine has a lot of functionality that would be redundant to me, if I could develop my own gallery that would be great but I don't know any PHP or MYSQL, let alone how to organise automatic thumbnail generation etc.